The end.

Despite the fact that we still love each other, and despite the fact we've worked so hard to make it work, Evan and I decided to break up yesterday. We're doing this now so that we can work on our own issues and come back together in the future as happy, whole people, able to start off on the right foot again. Logically, we both know that this is the best option for us right now. But that hasn't made it any less excrutiating.

I've been through all kinds of physical pain, but this is totally different and worse than all of them. I feel like I'm suffocating; I'm constantly having to gasp for air, even when I'm not doing anything. I've been spending time out of the house and with friends, which has been a huge help, but when I stay still for too long it creeps back over me and my heart starts pounding and I start sobbing again. Hearing myself cry makes me feel even worse, though, so then I stop and find something else to do. I'm always hungry but eating makes me nauseous. All I really want to do is put on one of Evan's t-shirts and curl up in bed and sleep. I just want to sleep for a month and wake up as a whole person again.

I know we did this so we could have a better chance at a future, but that's poor consolation when the present feels like this.

Echoes and shifts.

I read Speaker for the Dead years ago and passionately hated it, but it has one scene that's always stayed with me. The most interesting character in the novel is Jane, an artificial sentience that makes herself known to the protagonist Ender and piggybacks on his experiences via an earpiece he wears. At some point in the story (my memory is fuzzy), Jane distracts him while he's talking with another character and he temporarily turns off the earpiece. The next few pages describe the minute, complex, instantaneous effects of this action on Jane, who must completely restructure herself to adapt to this sudden disconnection from him. This is the only thing I remember from that entire book, and after I talked with Evan this afternoon, clicked End and put the phone back in my pocket, I realized that this transformation had suddenly happened to me. Our week apart and that conversation have shown me that Evan is living his own life now, and the connection between us has been severed and replaced with something else. The old me that was attached to him can no longer exist.

The only difference is that I don't have the efficient immediacy with which Jane recreated herself-- only that sudden awareness of isolation, need, and infinite loose ends.

Awww...

Some of the little girls in the community made me a Christmas ornament! Behold the cute.

I feel like the Grinch when his heart swells up and breaks the X-ray machine.

Two weeks' notice, squared

I took Monday off work to job hunt and yesterday gave my formal notice to quit. December 18th will be my last day. I'm alternating between huge waves of relief to finally be out of this job and quick, jarring pangs of panic about my future. I still don't have a new job locked down yet, but I've put in eight applications around town over the past few days and with the ongoing holiday rush I'm confident something decent will turn up soon. And if it doesn't, well, hard crunches like this are why I've been so frugal. I'd love to spend my savings on electronics, vacations and clothes-- to blow the whole thing on an orgasmic consumerist rampage-- but my parents raised me to be too practical to do that, which I guess I'm thankful for. (To an extent, anyway. My whole life is like that scene in South Park where Kyle can't toss his nunchaku down the well to avoid getting in trouble because he can't bear the idea of having wasted $20 on them. I don't know what the hell they put in the matzah balls when we're little to make us like this, but whatever it is it apparently stays with us for life. [Another anecdote: My boss (also Jewish) and I were given gift certificates to Honey Baked Ham for Christmas, but we're both unable to use them on the grounds that the place is way too expensive-- even though it's not our money being spent. How sad is that?])

On Sunday Evan and I also gave our relationship something of a two weeks' notice. We're taking the next two weeks off to sort out our own lives and then reconvene the Sunday after next to decide whether or not we'll stay together. I have no idea what will happen then, and at this point have no idea what I even want to happen. Things from this point on will at the very least be different.

It's a little disconcerting to think that my whole life could change in two weeks, or not change at all.